A few weeks ago the most dramatic Indian Premier League news used to be Matthew Hayden with a wee Mongoose in his paws. Or heaving stadiums reverberating with the sound of cowboy-hatted, miked-up umpires asking in Dolby surround sound, "Players are you ready? Bengaluru, are you ready?"

Cranking up the ante may be an IPL staple, but what's happening these days could make Don King swoon. The ‘world's hottest sports league' (Forbes feels so) is in boilover mode.

Lalit Modi, the man considered cricket's shiniest trophy is now the ornament whose plating is starting to chip. Not on television though because that is both his and the IPL's kingdom. Modi still shows up in our air space, trailed by plumes of coloured smoke and words saying that his latest enemy-in-chief had an agenda which "will be taken down." Oo, Dirty Harry, eat your heart out.

This is a man an international cricket CEO compared to George Bush: "either you are with him or you are against him". Lined up against Modi now is one of India's foreign ministers Shashi Tharoor, sections of an anxious BCCI and India's income tax department.

It all began when Modi picked a fight with the minister over one of the two new IPL franchises given to Kochi. The ECB one year, the Indian elections the next, so why not a minister in Season Three? It was a bad judge of a bull run, causing Modi to drag the BCCI and Indian cricket into the worst bogey for any new business: the taxman.

Yet, what is now happening in Indian cricket should have happened a long time ago - a questioning of the financial fundamentals on which the IPL was born and the BCCI is run.

What was the first lot of IPL franchise bidding process about? How are rights awarded? Why are franchise teams born through secret bids while cricketers are auctioned in public? Why can teams be bid in secret for anything, but player salaries be capped? What kind of sporting event has a US$20,000 dollar fine on a captain who is slow with the over-rate?

In the blinding and deafening marketing blitz that is the IPL, all that is usually swept away as party-pooper sceptimism. The man almost everyone in Indian and international cricket wanted to kow-tow to, was, after all, Midas both to his sport and his own career.

Five years ago, he was the son of a very-known business clan who had never succeeded. His student days in the US were strongly punctuated by a drug charge - which he can still never shake off. (Hardly surprising given that he plea-bargained himself in admitting to possession of cocaine, abduction and assault in a North Carolina court in 1985.)

In the 1990s, his Modi Entertainment Network which brought ESPN to India, but was left most memorably with Fashion TV. He spent a decade trying to break into the Indian board, armed with his idea of a city-based cricket league. Its template was not Europe's football, but American sports and its ability to manufacture new loyalties like a business moving into an untouched market.

Modi's chief opponent was the BCCI's '90s strongman Jagmohan Dalmiya. Once he was removed in 2005, Modi's mentors have helped him move up in their world. Now those very mandarins, huddled together in the Dalai Lama's town, are wondering just what to do with the marketing whiz kid, whose success lies in bypassing structures to generate truckloads of cash.

The man who invented cricket's new ad-break has sent his higher authority into what is a very real strategic time-out. This match is theirs to lose.